Friday, 26 August 2011

MIT Unravels the Secrets Behind Collective Intelligence – Hint: IQ Not So Important

When it comes to a successful group, the easiest way to ensure victory may be placing women on the team. MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence seeks to understand how humans get better (or worse) at solving problems as they work together. They studied hundreds of people working in small groups and found that they could determine a “C factor”, a key statistic that would predict if a group could perform well in a variety of tasks.

... Surprisingly, many common sense variables like group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction simply didn’t seem to matter much. Instead, MIT determined that groups with a high C factor were mostly defined by: